“…At the meteor plasma temperature of 4,400 K, water is effectively dissociated into H and OH, and, given sufficient time, OH is dissociated into O and H (Fig. 8 in Jenniskens et al, 2004c). From the [H]/[N] 5 1.4 6 0.3 3 10 2 4 result in the previous section, and after taking into account that ,79.8 % of all ambient atmospheric compounds are in the form of molecular nitrogen (with ,19.6% oxygen molecules and ,0.6% oxygen atoms), we calculated that if all hydrogen was due to ambient water (with two hydrogen atoms per molecule), the abundance of water in all forms in the mesopause at the altitude of the meteor (,80-90 km) would be in excess of 165 ppm.…”